Dear Mr. LaSalle: In your write-up of "Elles," I have to call you on your glib last line, "The Europeans know how to do sex, but we know how to do stories." "We" (Americans presumably) once knew stories, until many became bloated, tech-heavy and under-edited. There are master storytellers and artists around the world, with the capability to "do sex" as well to "do stories." Reducing this to a simplistic "them and us" advances neither the art nor the review.

Dear Mr. Clark: There's nothing wrong with a general comment if it's generally true. American films generally have well-constructed stories, or they're failed attempts at well-constructed stories. Meanwhile, it is a general failing of many European films that they have scant stories or, like "Elles," are arranged in two acts instead of three. But the sex in European films is usually engrossing, because it becomes a moment of character revelation, not mere plot information, and sex is almost always understood to be a product of intense emotion or longing. This is in contrast to sex scenes in most American films, which couldn't inspire enthusiasm in a high school boy trapped in a Viagra factory, because they're unreal or played for laughs or divorced from human emotion. There are cultural reasons for this, but that's a whole other discussion.

Dear Dave Sironen: He had a beautiful voice, and he was handsome, he was a natural for adventure stories and he was just as good in dramatic films, such as "Arrowsmith." In his later years, he excelled in comedy. He had something of a gentlemanly style, which is out of vogue, but other than that, what's not to like?

Dear Mick: "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset" have been criticized as dialogue heavy, but dialogue is the essence of romance. If people don't talk to each other, it's only mating.

Dear James: Though it's possible to imagine some exceptions, that's probably true. But complaints about the dialogue-heavy nature of the "Before" movies usually come as part of a larger argument about dialogue being un-cinematic, that the best cinema is "pure cinema," which doesn't require dialogue. This argument is usually presented as something that everybody knows to be true, and yet all you have to do is watch movies to know it's not true.

Dialogue is often extremely cinematic, just as action is often un-cinematic. Cinema depends on forward motion. Something has to be happening. You can have dialogue in which nothing happening, and you have a dead scene. Or you can have dialogue like that in the "Before" movies, which is an enormous courtship dance with lots at stake. Likewise, you can have a life-and-death action scene, or some boring epic battle in the middle of a movie, in which nothing can happen, because if one side wins, the movie is over.

Dear Mr. LaSalle: Do you have any idea why the French film "Intouchables," a word that means "untouchables" in English, has been translated as "The Intouchables"? Or shall we just assume that there is more than one ignorant idiot in the movie industry in this country?

Dear Mr. Gamboa: I really don't see the harm of adding the word "the," if it helps people find their way to the movie. Just "Intouchables" might have confused people. If anything, the distributor should be praised for not calling it "The Untouchables," which would have tricked people into thinking they were getting a movie about crime buster Eliot Ness and not 112 minutes of a French quadriplegic and his laugh-a-minute Senegalese assistant. The former would have been a much easier sell, and not just with ignorant idiots. {sbox}

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